Design Video Streaming Infrastructure for mobile apps
Last updated: May 31, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a geo-distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Snapchat
System Design
Software Engineer
Snapchat
May 31, 2026Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Hard
58
4
3,677 solved
Design a geo-distributed video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Snapchat typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
Key Topics to Cover
API design and rate limiting
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
High-level architecture and component design
Partitioning and sharding strategies
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Users should be able to upload and stream videos in real-time.
- Support for adaptive bitrate streaming to optimize performance based on network conditions.
- Us...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assuming 300 million daily active users, with 30% engaging in video streaming.
- Concurrent Users: Peak times could see about 10 million concurrent streams.
- Data Size: Avera...
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